Category Archives: Music

There’s something very soothing about hitting a gong. The sounds and vibrations can hold you like a warm duvet and wok their way into your core.

Using them in meditation for recall at the end of a session is a pleasant and gentle way of re-entering normal waking consciousness, but there’s an interesting Guardian piece describing their use in sound baths to take you into a meditative altered state of consciousness instead.

If you were a microphone/camera gifted with free flight, and were also imbued with empathy and reflexivity, you could on each orbital flight appreciate the physical and natural wonders of the atmosphere, not forgetting human communications technology. As you soared you would also be open to the metaphysical and spiritual realms that are within your orbit.

I’ve set up a direct purchase link for Spirits of Place & Time on RouteNote for those who don’t like to contribute to the profit margins of iTunes, Amazon and the other usual suspects. PayPal is the purchase method.

Four instrumental tracks about the … well, spirits of place and time. From the primordial caves around the hot springs of Bath, through ancient and modern Cornwall to the 20th century west midlands via Beethoven, and beyond to Santorini and Crete.

Science has (again) caught up with what we knew all along. Listening to low-quality compressed music is not good for you. Specifically a study by the Audio Engineering Society on the effects of lossy compression on the ‘timbre spaces’ of a variety of instruments has found that listening to low bit-rate bilge boosts negative emotions (scary, sad etc) and kicks the legs from underneath positive ones (happy, calm, heroic etc).

Sounds like a good reason to keep your inner emo under control and go for FLAC or insist on 320kbps downloads.

The piece talks about software companies having their asses sued for being economical with the truth about their products boosting brain power. Hmm, wonder if the TrumpistaBrexiteers have been investing in such software?

Plenty of activity in the studio at the moment – I’m about about a third of the way into a new ambient instrumental album, with another couple of instrumental pieces on the back burner. Where’s a lottery win when you need to buy more time?